I have to admit I am not too diligent when it comes to bike maintenance. I basically don’t do it until I have to. I don’t clean my chain very often. When it gets noisy, I spray some oil on it, mostly whatever is sitting around, which tends to be old brake fluid, and go for the next ride. It can be pretty embarrassing to meet people for a group ride with my chain and cassette caked in grease and dirt.
So I wanted to take a step towards changing that. I had always wondered if there was an easier way to clean the chain and cassette, without scrubbing them by hand, and at some point I had come across ultrasonic cleaners, but never really looked into it. Finally I checked them out on amazon, the prices weren’t too bad, between 50 and 300 Euro depending on the size of the tank. I decided to give it a shot. Here is the link to the one I bought on Amazon:
I also needed to order some kind of cleaner, and wasn’t really sure what to buy. I came across a forum post were a guy recommended this for cleaning bike chains, and that was good enough for me. Here is the link:
I took the chain from my daily driver, which was looking pretty bad, and gave it a shot. There isn’t much to explain about the process. You just put the Nigrin Solution in the tub, plug it in, set the
temperature and the time, and press start. It buzzes a bit, the time timer starts counting down, and you see the current temperature of the solution, which slowly rises. You don’t see anything actually
happening.
The temperature of the bath does rise, but over the single 30 minute cycle it only reached 30 degrees or so, starting from 17 in the workshop. I ran it a 2nd time and it got up to around 50 degrees.
At the end of the cycle I took the chain out, and was pretty impressed! It wasn’t perfect, but it looked really good! There was still some grease on the inside in the joints if you looked closely, but I would never have gotten the chain this clean if I had done it by hand!
In conclusion, my first impression is pretty good! Looking forward to trying some different chains out to get a better feeling for what this thing is capable of. I do wonder if perhaps the results would be just as good if the chain was simply in a warm bath of the cleaner, without the ultrasonic function. Have you tried it?
